With the increasing prevalence of
behavioral issues (obesity\, alcoholism\, substance use)\, healthcare and
medicine have recently focussed on finding health-promoting lifestyle int
erventions for health and well-being\, in addition to their traditional fo
cus on treating contracted diseases.

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At the same time\, embodied c
onversational characters (ECAs) are emerging as having the potential to pr
ovide natural human-computer interactions in a variety of contexts\, e.g.
intelligent tutoring systems\, serious games\, and computer-based health p
romotion interventions. ECAs dialog and multimodal expressiveness abiliti
es render them innately accessible to interact with –\; for technical
and non-technical users alike.

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In this talk we describe some of t
he promises and challenges of building ECAs who can deliver behavior chang
e interventions. We discuss the design and implementation of the prototyp
e of an avatar-based health system aimed at increasing people access to an
effective evidence-based intervention that supports motivation toward beh
avior change. We focus particularly on the need for the ECA to express so
me level of empathy during these interactions\, and present early evaluati
on results regarding user’\;s acceptance of the ECA’\;s\, and of
the ECA’\;s perceived empathic ability.

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Bio:

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Christine Laetitia Lisetti is a faculty at F
lorida International University in the S
chool of Computing and Information Sciences. She conducts research in
Affective Computing\, which lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelli
gence (AI) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in Computer Science\, of e
motion and personality theories in Psychology\, and of social interaction
in Communication. Her long-term research goal is to create digital and en
gaging socially intelligent agents who can interact naturally with humans
via expressive multi-modalities in a variety of contexts involving socio-e
motional content (e.g. empathetic health coach\, social companion\, cyber-
therapy\, intelligent tutoring system\, serious/educational game). She is
on the founding Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing\, and rece
ntly\, she has become interested in applying Affective Computing technique
s to develop novel applications in health informatics for health promotion and health interventi
ons.